QUILLBLOG

Raging bull

The most talked-about book launch of the season has apparently left a rather sour taste in the mouth of Craig Davidson. The Penguin Canada author, you’ll remember, stepped into the boxing ring early this month, squaring off against another writer to promote his new novel The Fighter. Davidson expected to lose the fight and did indeed lose, but by all reports he escaped any serious injury, and the event was an unqualified publicity success. So you may wonder just what he has to be aggrieved about.

Plenty, apparently.

In a very long and angry post-mortem piece on his Penguin blog, Davidson complains about portrayals of the event as a “stunt” — this was no stunt, this was a real fight, he insists — and then moves on to complain that his opponent, ECW Press poet Michael Knox, treated the event as, um, a real fight. The repeated implication is that Knox should have seen how overmatched Davidson was and gone much easier on him than he did.

Davidson also throws volleys of furious adolescent name-calling at ECW editor Michael Holmes, apparently because Holmes had dared to position the evening as a big press-small press battle — a little piece of theatre that seemed pretty harmless to Quillblog.

(And it was a battle that the small press lost on at least one flank, incidentally. At the event, there were no copies of Knox’s book for sale next to the stacks of Davidson’s — at least, not until ECW trucked a few in from their own office at the last minute.)

Proof once again that publishing types and athletic pursuits do not mix. Read Davidson’s rant while you can, before someone at Penguin talks him into removing it. (Update: too late, it’s gone.)

Update again: Davidson has now posted about the missing post.

Related links:
Click here for Davidson’s blog entry
Click here for Davidson’s post about the missing post

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